McBane, Barbara
Imagining Sound in the Solax Films of Alice Guy Blache: Canned Harmony (1912) and Burstop Holmes' Murder Case (1913)
Film History: An International Journal - Volume 18, Number 2, 2006, pp. 185-195

Indiana University Press

Barbara McBane - Imagining Sound in the Solax Films of Alice Guy Blache: Canned Harmony (1912) and Burstop Holmes' Murder Case (1913) - Film History: An International Journal 18:2 Film History: An International Journal 18.2 (2006) 185-195 Imagining sound in the Solax films of Alice Guy Blach�: Canned Harmony (1912) and Burstop Holmes' Murder Case (1913) Barbara McBane Abstract Alice Guy Blach�'s onscreen depictions of sound prompt an enquiry into this suppressed realm of early cinema, which often figures marginalized social groups. Women's increased public presence and vocality and the suffrage debates are shown to be expressed obliquely in Guy Blache's work, through extra-diegetic visual references and the imagination of sound. The historical overlap of the development of early 20th century film sound technologies with women's emergence into the public sphere is a suggestive intertwining. The amplification of women's voices as public presences was quite literally facilitated by changes in communications technologies and by the new public spheres that arose where these technologies were used. Women's prominence in efforts to reform and regulate cinema and the places it was exhibited is only one obvious example. Advocates for suffrage and women's rights formulated strategies for exploiting the public relations possibilities that then 'new' media such as film and phonography offered to make their views and voices heard. A turn-of-the-century revolution...